Influence of sociodemographic factors on eating motivations - modelling through artificial neural networks (ANN)

This study aimed at investigating the influence of some sociodemographic factors on the eating motivations. A longitudinal study was carried conducted with 11960 participants from 16 countries. Data analysis included t-test for independent samples or ANOVA, and neural network models were also created, to relate the input and output variables. Results showed that factors like age, marital status, country, living environment, level of education or professional area significantly influenced all of the studied types of eating motivations. Neural networks modelling indicated variability in the food choices, but identifying some trends, for example the strongest positive factor determining health motivations was age, while for emotional motivations was living environment, and for economic and availability motivations was gender. On the other hand, country revealed a high positive influence for the social and cultural as well as for environmental and political and also for marketing and commercial motivations.This is the peer-reviewed version of the following article: Guine, R. P. F.; Ferrao, A. C.; Ferreira, M.; Correia, P.; Mendes, M.; Bartkiene, E.; Szucs, V.; Tarcea, M.; Matek-Sarić, M.; Cernelić-Bizjak, M.; Isoldi, K.; EL-Kenawy, A.; Ferreira, V.; Klava, D.; Korzeniowska, M.; Vittadini, E.; Leal, M.; Frez-Munoz, L.; Papageorgiou, M.; Djekić, I. Influence of Sociodemographic Factors on Eating Motivations - Modelling through Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 2020, 71 (5), 614–627. [https://doi.org/10.1080/09637486.2019.1695758]

Childhood-onset of primary Sjogren's syndrome:phenotypic characterization at diagnosis of 158 children

Objectives. To characterize the phenotypic presentation at diagnosis of childhood-onset primary SS.Methods. The Big Data Sjogren Project Consortium is an international, multicentre registry using worldwide data-sharing cooperative merging of pre-existing clinical SS databases from the five continents. For this study, we selected those patients in whom the disease was diagnosed below the age of 19years according to the fulfilment of the 2002/2016 classification criteria.Results. Among the 12083 patients included in the Sjogren Big Data Registry, 158 (1.3%) patients had a childhood-onset diagnosis (136 girls, mean age of 14.2years): 126 (80%) reported dry mouth, 111 (70%) dry eyes, 52 (33%) parotid enlargement, 118/122 (97%) positive minor salivary gland biopsy and 60/64 (94%) abnormal salivary US study, 140/155 (90%) positive ANA, 138/156 (89%) anti-Ro/La antibodies and 86/142 (68%) positive RF. The systemic EULAR Sjogren's syndrome disease activity index (ESSDAI) domains containing the highest frequencies of active patients included the glandular (47%), articular (26%) and lymphadenopathy (25%) domains. Patients with childhood-onset primary SS showed the highest mean ESSDAI score and the highest frequencies of systemic disease in 5 (constitutional, lymphadenopathy, glandular, cutaneous and haematological) of the 12 ESSDAI domains, and the lowest frequencies in 4 (articular, pulmonary, peripheral nerve and CNS) in comparison with patients with adult-onset disease.Conclusions. Childhood-onset primary SS involves around 1% of patients with primary SS, with a clinical phenotype dominated by sicca features, parotid enlargement and systemic disease. Age at diagnosis plays a key role in modulating the phenotypic expression of the disease.</p

Study about some environmental factors that determine people’s food choices in 16 different countries

In the ambit of the multinational project EATMOT undertaken in 16 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and United States of America) a study was undertaken to evaluate the motivations for food choices as influenced by variables linked to sustainability. In this way aspects related with minimization of transportation and storage of food products, minimization of package or use of eco-materials, respect for animal’s rights and policies of recovery of food surplus were studied. The food sector is a very important one and greatly contributes to the pressure over the ecosystems, either because a great amount of food is produced, many times in intensive regimens, to feed humans on earth or because those foods are nowadays traded all over the world, contributing for the increase of the ecological footprint, and most especially if the transportation requires refrigeration systems. Hence, nowadays consumers may be aware of these problems and condition some of their food choices to these aspects. The research was undertaken by means of a questionnaire survey on nearly 12 thousand participants, from the 16 countries cited above. Briefly, the results indicated that, in general the concerns with environment and sustainability are important for most of the participants. Specifically, 55.2% preferably choose foods form the season and 49.15 prefer to buy local foods. About half of the participants (50.4%) opt for foods that comply with sustainable processing and packaging and the minimal usage of packaging is important to 49.1%. While a great majority, 70.7% try to avoid food waste at home, when it to comes to frequenting restaurants that do not have a recovery policy of food surplus the percentage is much lower, only 18.6%. The animal´s rights are a conditioning factor for food choice for about half of the participants, 49.8%. Still, it was observed that many of the participants did not manifest their opinion, with a percentage varying between 17.2 and 46.7%. These findings are important to understand the level of commitment of the general population around the world with sustainability factors determining their food choices and on the other hand show that there is still an important part of the population that do not take care about sustainability aspects when buying or consuming food, which something that we do several times everyday and year after year.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Study about Food Choice Determinants According to Six Types of Conditioning Motivations in a Sample of 11,960 Participants

Many aspects linked to personal characteristics, society and culture constitute some of the motivators that drive food choice. The aim of this work was to determine in what extent the eating behaviors of individuals are shaped by six different types of determinants, namely: health, emotions, price and availability, society and culture, environment and politics, and marketing and commercials. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study, involving a non-probabilistic sample of 11,960 participants from 16 countries. The objective of this work was to validate the questionnaire, so as to make it suitable for application in different contexts and different countries. For that, six scales were considered for validation by confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modelling. The obtained results showed that the six individual scales evaluated presented good or very good fitting indices, with saturation in goodness-of-fit index in all cases. The values of chi-square ratio were 6.921 (for health), 0.987 (environment), 0.610 (emotions) and 0.000 in the remaining cases (convenience, society, marketing). Furthermore, the fit was perfect, with saturation for all indices, in three of the six models (convenience, society and marketing). The results of this wok allowed the validation of the six scales, and the assessing of different types of factors that can influence food choices and eating behaviors, namely in the categories: health, emotions, price and availability, society and culture, environment and politics, and marketing and commercials